The Kid: The Immortal Life of Ted Williams

by Ben Bradlee Jr.

  Williams’s deteriorating vision was also making it more difficult for him to see the Red Sox games on his big-screen television. He told Dom DiMaggio about this, as well as about his feelings of isolation, and DiMaggio found a way to address both problems: “I said, ‘Teddy, how many guys do you see—you get a lot of guys coming?’ ” DiMaggio recalled. “He said, ‘Dommie, I don’t see anybody, and I have a hard time getting information on the game. I’ve got a big-screen TV, but I’m having trouble seeing it. People around here don’t understand the game. I know when they win or lose, but I don’t know the details.’ I said, ‘Teddy, this is what I’m going to do. I will call you every morning and give you the report in detail of the Sox game.’ He said, ‘Oh, that would be good.’ So I called him every game except for a day off. Sometimes I would forget, and I’d kick myself.”8

  The press sensed Ted was nearing the end of the line, and Williams probably did, too, so he gave several valedictory interviews in which he offered some insights on his career and his persona.

  Talking to Bob Greene for a Life magazine spread in February of 2000, he confessed, “My most disappointing things all my life were always related to baseball. I didn’t feel good because I did something successfully—I felt bad if I failed to do something that I was expected to do.” Williams said that while he always wanted people to think he was the greatest hitter who ever lived, he never believed it himself. “I didn’t believe it then, and I don’t believe it now,” he said. “Babe Ruth, Hank Aaron, they were so good.”

  And what made him happy these days? The sound of birds, Ted said. “I’ve got five clocks in my house, and they all sing different songs, on the hour. At 10 a.m., I might hear eight or ten birds sing at the same time. I’ve learned to love to hear those clocks sing. The beautiful songs.”9

  In July, Williams explained to Paul Reid of the Palm Beach Post that before he was a fisherman he’d been a hunter. “I think the most peaceful times of my life were spent at dawn, in a duck blind somewhere,” Ted said. “Manitoba. Minnesota. You wait for the flocks, it’s quiet, a breeze maybe. So quiet. So majestic. But then the great bird migrations got not so great. The birds disappeared. People did that, yes? Not hunters, but mankind. What a wacky bunch we humans are.”

  Ted complained, quite forcefully, about getting old. “The so-called golden years. What a lot of bull. I think you ought to get a pill when you turn 72, a pill to take if and when you think it’s time. I call it the Kevorkian pill.”

  More than anything, Reid was struck by Williams’s curiosity. Ted asked the writer who he thought the most important American of the century was. Knowing Ted’s conservative politics, Reid thought he would tweak him by answering FDR. While Williams mustered a few kind words for Roosevelt, he said he had someone else in mind.

  MacArthur? Reid guessed.

  “That’s the ticket,” said Ted. “Douglas MacArthur. There’s a book about him, a book I read and then picked right up again and reread. American Caesar I think is the title. It’s written by… ah, written by…”

  “William Manchester,” Reid said.

  “Yes. What a writer.”

  Reid told Williams that he and Manchester had a few things in common. Manchester had been a Marine, wounded in Okinawa, and he was a lifelong Red Sox fan. Then Reid asked Ted if he’d like the renowned biographer’s phone number. Reid was a good friend of Manchester’s and before long would be chosen by the ailing writer to finish the third volume of his trilogy on Winston Churchill. Manchester would die in 2004.

  Williams, always sensitive about his lack of formal education, asked Reid if he thought Manchester would really want to talk to him. Reid said he was quite sure the answer would be yes.

  So the phone call was arranged, and it turned out that Ted and Manchester had something else in common: they had both faced Vic Raschi, the late New York Yankees pitcher. Manchester told Williams that he and Raschi had grown up in Springfield, Massachusetts—Manchester a light-hitting second baseman for Springfield’s Classical High School and Raschi a flamethrower for Springfield Technical. Raschi made quick work of Manchester the one time he faced him, striking him out easily. “He threw so hard I couldn’t even see the ball,” said Manchester. “I feared for my life.”

  Back in Ted’s kitchen, Reid watched as the Kid picked up a baseball in his right hand and gazed at it “with all the intensity of Hamlet with Yorick’s noggin.” Then he sighed, rolled the ball across the table, and said: “I was a ballplayer.”

  “Like a Ferrari is a car, Ted,” Reid said.

  Williams smiled at that. Reid thought Ted knew he was going to die soon.10

  As John-Henry had hoped, following Ted’s appearance at the All-Star Game, Hitter.net received a surge of interest, not only in the form of hits on its website but also in the form of some inquiries about buying the company. The most serious potential buyer was Duro Communications, a large Internet service provider near Orlando that had raised more than $100 million in equity and had quickly acquired dozens of smaller ISPs. But one issue soon emerged: Duro was only interested in the dial-up, ISP portion of Hitter, not its Web hosting component—that is, porn—and it concluded that the businesses were too intermingled.

  Still, talks continued for almost a year through various fits and starts, but no deal would be had. “John-Henry was a sales and marketing guy with little regard for finances or understanding of finances, in my opinion,” said Ted Taylor, head of Duro’s investment bank. “The numbers didn’t prove out all the time. His accountant would have some problems trying to reconcile John-Henry’s numbers, and Duro was very thorough in their due diligence, and there were always things that came to light each time we would get close to a deal.”

  At one point, Taylor, who participated in the negotiations, said the company offered John-Henry a figure that was “north of $5 million” for Hitter. Peter Sutton, Williams’s Boston-based lawyer, said that the figure was about $7 million, and that he and others advised John-Henry to “take it and run.”

  But John-Henry chose to hold out for more, believing he could ride the dot-com boom higher. However, the Internet bubble peaked in March of 2000 and went downhill, bursting by 2001. At the same time, interest rates increased, and the economy slowed.

  “At the end, it fell apart because the numbers just wouldn’t support the minimum price John-Henry wanted,” Taylor said. “We kept trying to make it work, and it didn’t. The fact of the matter was John-Henry was an excellent salesman, but he wasn’t focused enough on what he was trying to do. We told him Hitter would go under, but he was in denial. He had the forethought and vision to build that business at first, but he should have found a techie and a business partner who would manage it for him. He was a nice guy, he commanded a presence; he just didn’t know his own limitations.”11

  Duro’s warning that Hitter would fail was prescient. Though his porn business was still healthy, John-Henry had acquired new and bigger computer equipment using leveraged money, and his bandwidth costs had increased substantially. He had postponed paying a growing list of creditors, assuming that Hitter would be sold, but when Duro walked away, he felt he had no alternative but to protect his company and himself, so on July 21, 2000, Hitter filed for bankruptcy in Orlando, listing assets of $1,293,183.92 against liabilities of $5,518,608.71.

  John-Henry delegated Anita Lovely to deliver the bankruptcy news to Ted. Williams was upset, naturally, and as it happened, Bob Breitbard, Ted’s boyhood pal from San Diego, was visiting at the time. Ted and Breitbard exchanged annual visits, with Williams usually going to San Diego in the winter and Breitbard coming to Florida in the summer, around Ted’s birthday. As pained as Williams was to learn that Hitter had gone bankrupt, Breitbard had another John-Henry issue to raise: young Williams had only repaid him $250,000 of the $500,000 Breitbard had loaned him in 1993. Frank Brothers, who was present for this discussion, recalled Breitbard saying, “Ted, I’m gonna be honest with you. Your son has never paid me a dime of the $250,000 he owes me. And the o
nly reason I’m telling you this is I have children. As long as I’m alive, nothing’s going to happen. But if I die before you, my children are going to go after your son for that money. The only reason I’m telling you this is because I love you.”12

  Ted tried to absorb this second blow. John-Henry had assured Breitbard that he was going to repay him in full, but Williams was now frantic. Over the next few days he worked the phones, trying to determine what he might sell immediately to repay his friend. The likely choice was his place on the Miramichi River in Canada.

  Ted might also have been pondering his own financial condition. Not only would he have to find some way to pay the $250,000 he’d just learned John-Henry still owed, but the $570,000 he had put up as collateral for John-Henry’s Hitter loan from SunTrust had been quickly seized by the bank after the bankruptcy filing. And God only knew how much money John-Henry had taken from the memorabilia companies—Ted Williams Family Enterprises and Green Diamond Sports—to invest in Hitter.

  Ted had willingly given John-Henry his power of attorney, but some of the caretakers and aides say that Williams was pressured into signing papers even though he didn’t know what he was signing. “Once, John-Henry was having Ted sign papers that were blank,” said John Sullivan, a caretaker from 1997 to 2000. “He was signing pages for a larger document. Ted said, ‘I want you to tell me what it said!’ John-Henry said something that didn’t satisfy him, and they got into a shouting match.”13

  Another time, when Mary Dluhy, an aide to John-Henry from 1997 to 2001, was sitting with Ted at his kitchen table, having him sign a document, Williams said to her: “Mary, tell me I still own my own house.”14

  “Of course,” Dluhy replied, tearing up as she recalled the story.*

  Within a few days of being told that Hitter had gone bankrupt and that John-Henry still had not fully repaid Bob Breitbard, Ted developed angry red blotches on his chest and under his left arm. “Ted came down with a case of the shingles and was in great pain,” George Carter said. “The stress really got to him. It was pitiful to see what this kid did to his father. It was just pitiful. When Ted got the shingles, that was a turning point. He spiraled down after that. I seen it happen right before my eyes.”15

  A few weeks later, Hitter’s link to pornography was partially revealed. The St. Petersburg Times reported that a man who worked for Strictly Hosting, Hitter’s dummy corporation, had been arrested and accused of raping a teenage girl. The article said that while the ties between Hitter and Strictly Hosting were unclear, when a reporter called Hitter and asked for Strictly Hosting, he ended up being put through to Hitter CEO John-Henry. John-Henry was quoted as saying that Hitter merely provided Strictly Hosting with high-bandwidth access to the Internet, and he denied that the two companies had any corporate links. Fortunately for John-Henry, Ted never heard about any of this and thus was spared further strain.16

  In early October, the Red Sox announced that the team was for sale. John-Henry—not lacking for chutzpah less than three months after Hitter had filed for bankruptcy—was one of the first to call John Harrington, who ran the Sox on behalf of Jean Yawkey’s JRY Trust, to express an interest in acquiring the club. John-Henry said he would be forming an investor group with his father as the titular head and wanted to let Harrington know that the group would be a contender. Harrington never took him seriously. “We looked at it as John-Henry saying to the world, ‘Hey, you want the inside track? Bring me in,’ ” Harrington said.17

  Still, John-Henry called Dan Shaughnessy of the Globe to fan interest in his bid. “There’s an awful lot of work ahead to make something like this come off,” he told Shaughnessy, whose story appeared under the headline A SPLENDID IDEA: TED CONSIDERS SOX. Said John-Henry, “We’ve had some positive people looking at all of our options regarding this, and over the next few weeks we’re going to have to put together a group. Unfortunately, Dad and I don’t have $400 million. But something that we do have is something that cannot be bought, and that is the Ted Williams name and the Ted Williams legacy and the Ted Williams feeling about baseball.” The Hitter bankruptcy, little known outside of Citrus County, was not mentioned in the Globe story.

  Baseball commissioner Bud Selig reacted favorably: “I will say that there is no name more synonymous with the Red Sox than Ted Williams.” But Ted himself—still staggered by Hitter’s bankruptcy, the lingering debt to Breitbard, and that painful case of shingles—hardly sounded as though he saw himself as a baseball baron. “John-Henry’s talked to me about it, and he’s got his own ideas,” Williams told Shaughnessy less than enthusiastically. “It’s gonna take a lot of dough, I don’t know how much. I’m a little peon down here. I might be able to buy the strap that holds third base.”18*

  In fact, on the night of October 30, just eighteen days after the Globe trial balloon, Ted was taken to Shands Hospital in Gainesville after having a hard time breathing. Williams had barely slept for two days and was showing symptoms of Cheyne-Stokes respiration—an abnormal breathing pattern alternating between slow, deep breaths and short, quick breaths, sometimes followed by a temporary stoppage of breathing altogether. Paged by Ted’s caretakers Frank Brothers and George Carter, John-Henry drove over quickly from his house at nearby Black Diamond Ranch. Eric Abel soon appeared as well. John-Henry called an ambulance, but when it arrived, Ted balked, saying he wouldn’t get in. The ambulance driver said that without the patient’s consent he couldn’t go anywhere. So Frank and George lifted Ted into Williams’s Suburban and drove the sixty-odd miles to Shands as John-Henry and Abel followed in John-Henry’s BMW.

  Since Cheyne-Stokes breathing can be associated with heart failure, Williams’s cardiologist, Rick Kerensky, had been alerted and was waiting for Ted when he arrived at the emergency room. It was quickly determined that he should be admitted to the hospital. John-Henry told Frank and George to check into a motel across the street. They would be based there but take turns staying in Williams’s room to help with his care and, on alternating twelve-hour shifts, keep him company. Carter asked John-Henry if he wanted him to inform his sisters, Claudia and Bobby-Jo, that Ted had been admitted to the hospital. No, John-Henry told Carter; he would call his sisters.

  Around 2:00 a.m., John-Henry and Abel were hungry, so they drove to a nearby Chevron gas station off Interstate 75 and picked up some snacks from the station’s all-night convenience store. As he ate in the car, John-Henry’s mind was racing. He realized his father was declining quickly. In two days, Kerensky would be performing a catheterization procedure on Ted’s heart, likely a precursor to installing a pacemaker several days later. John-Henry decided it was time to revisit with Abel, his best friend, a delicate subject he had first raised with the lawyer three years earlier: cryonics.

  Cryonicists, operating on the margins of society, believe people can be frozen after they die in the hope that advancing science and medical knowledge will one day be able to bring them back to life through a process they call reanimation.

  John-Henry was intrigued by the practice, which operates under the Uniform Anatomical Gift Act, a law that allows people to donate their bodies to medical schools or laboratories for research. He had watched a documentary about cryonics on the Discovery Channel, conducted some research on his own, and was mindful that cryonics, while still widely viewed as a highly improbable theory subscribed to by several hundred eccentrics, had nonetheless seeped into popular culture through numerous science-fiction stories and movies like Woody Allen’s Sleeper and Forever Young, starring Mel Gibson.

  Now, as Ted Williams neared death, John-Henry was getting increasingly serious about freezing his father’s remains.

  The first time he raised the subject of cryonics with Abel, in 1997, they were at Ted’s house, fooling around online. John-Henry went to various cryonics websites. He showed Abel the two leading practitioners: the Alcor Life Extension Foundation, in Arizona, and the Cryonics Institute, in Michigan. “They freeze you on the chance they can bring you back,” John-Henry explained. Abe
l told him he was out of his mind.

  In fact, young Williams had casually broached cryonics directly with Ted back in 1997. Frank Brothers was there at the time, along with another aide, Donna Fleischmann. “They were just finishing breakfast when John-Henry said, ‘Dad, you ever heard of cryonics?’ Ted goes, ‘Yeah, I’ve heard of it; they freeze your body,’ ” Brothers recalled. “John-Henry goes, ‘Well, you want to be frozen?’ and Ted goes, ‘No.’ But John-Henry kept pushing. ‘They can freeze you; they can only freeze your head,’ and Ted’s like, ‘I’ve already signed my will, John-Henry. I want to be cremated.’ The kid kept pushing it, and finally Ted just pushed himself from the table, and he got up without his walker and started walking back to his room. Oh, he was pissed.”19 Fleischmann confirmed the conversation: “Ted had a few choice words for the cryonics idea. He said it was never going to happen.”20

  Brothers said there were two other occasions when he and Williams discussed cryonics after John-Henry first raised the subject. And from those encounters, Brothers gathered that John-Henry was still talking to his father about the idea. Later in 1997, Brothers and Ted were watching a documentary about cryonics on TV. “We watched the thing, and Ted goes, ‘That’s a crock of shit.’ Then he said something like, ‘I can’t believe John-Henry still wants to have me frozen.’ ” The second conversation with Williams occurred in 1999 as Brothers was putting him to bed one night: “Ted brought it up to me that ‘John-Henry talked to me again about that cryogenics crap.’ ”

  As he grew more interested in the subject, John-Henry asked various family friends, including Dom DiMaggio, what they thought of cryonics. “I remember him talking about it in Ted’s kitchen,” DiMaggio recalled. “I didn’t pay much attention to it. Then he said to me, ‘What do you think of it?’ I said something like, ‘That’s way off. Only a dream.’ I never dreamed he was thinking of that for Ted.”21